Shards are not necessarily in use because of technical limitations at all - shards may be intrinsic to the problem that a huge online persistent world just might get boring.

I agree. The posts I've seen from MMORPG developers about scalability tend to be about the problem of scaling the content. Unless Jeff's platform also creates content, the work required to build and populate a big world for 50k players instead of making 25 copies of a small 2k-player world still makes sharding attractive.

Then again, Anarchy Online did try the 50k player world option and they failed mainly because of technical reasons. It was simply the buggiest AAA-level game that I've ever played, even a year after its release, so maybe Sun can sell the platform to Funcom.

Seems to me the most unsurmountable problem isn't technical at all, but rather the ability to provide dynamic, engaging content.

But merging the dynamic and engaging content is what makes MMO games so difficult. This is not a technical issue.

And I think that is not the real problem.

A better way to state the problem is this: Keeping players interested in the plot that you are feeding them.

But that isn't an exact definition of the problem either. It is getting closer to the real problem though.

The real problem, and it has parallels in the real world, is a control issue.

There is not a single game out there, to my knowledge, that disassociates player freedom with game rules.

Let me step back to paper and pen RPGs for a moment.I loved playing starwars. Even a beginning character could hose a stormtrooper, no problem. The reason? Player characters are SPECIAL.

Now, your real issue is making each and every one of your 50,000 online players feel unique and special.

There are several routes to this, Most of them don't work for very long.

1) Have plot missions that characters can fill. The effectiveness of this is limited in a chat environment, where players will ask "How do you complete missions x?" Everyone does the same cookie cutter mission. Such fun. Kinda like a puzzle filled FPS...with lag!

2) Put lots of detail and things in your game. Hundreds of skills, skill levels, points, attributes, objects, manufacturing thingies, etc. make them pluggable so that you can just keep adding more and more and more and more. "My Super Wanda Sword beats your Vorpal Sword iX!" "No, I no longer use the IX, I have a Super Wanda 2!" My virtual sword is bigger than yours! This gets tiring, but not as quickly as reason 1 stated above.

3) Obfuscate the plot. Obfuscate the high end gadgets that the players can get. This is supposed to work towards adding a level of suspense. Yeah, right. THis is dreadfully annoying for anyone that isn't a noob player.

4) Add real, INDIVIDUAL, dynamic content.This is not truly a technical issue. THis is a "we don't give a @#$% about the players" issue. This is a "My game, my plot, MY CREATION" issue. To my knowledge, even though it is possible, no one has built a persistent online world that each player has the capability to rise to power, overthrow the head honcho NPC characters, and get knifed in the back by his/her buddy who wants to run things now.

If you build a system where the players drive the plot, instead of act like ancilliary extras on a large movie set, you will have a game that blows the competition away.

This is not a technically challenging thing. Yet no one does this. The only people that can truly provide your game with 100% dynamic content is your players. Set up the game play, initialize a basic plot, and let the players take control of your world. The basic plot dies, but is replaced with your players struggling to create their own world-spanning empire. When one faction gets too powerful, send in your alien/goblin invasion, bash everyone mercilessly, reward the best ten players with a new desktop computer system, and take control of their characters, turn them int oNPCs for the next wave of players to overcome, etc.

Yeah...I'm a genius.

Beware the rabbit of the mind, for it gnaweth on the carrot of the soul.

You have some interesting ideas. I suggest you subscribe to MUD-DEV (visit kanga.nu for details) you'll find a very large number of ex pen-n-paper roleplayers talking about online games development.

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4) Add real, INDIVIDUAL, dynamic content.This is not truly a technical issue. THis is a "we don't give a @#$% about the players" issue. This is a "My game, my plot, MY CREATION" issue. To my knowledge, even though it is possible, no one has built a persistent online world that each player has the capability to rise to power, overthrow the head honcho NPC characters, and get knifed in the back by his/her buddy who wants to run things now.

If you build a system where the players drive the plot, instead of act like ancilliary extras on a large movie set, you will have a game that blows the competition away.

This is not a technically challenging thing. Yet no one does this.

This is incredibly difficult to do. No, really. As it happens, it's one of the areas where we've concentrated on adding value, and is one of the reasons why I'm unexcited by Sun producing a technology that's all about things like preventing the need for shards.

Would you like to see my design layout for this? It would take me a few days to put it together, as it is still mostly on notepaper currently. But I would be happy to share my grandoise and megalomaniacal ideas....

Beware the rabbit of the mind, for it gnaweth on the carrot of the soul.

4) Add real, INDIVIDUAL, dynamic content.This is not truly a technical issue. THis is a "we don't give a @#$% about the players" issue. This is a "My game, my plot, MY CREATION" issue. To my knowledge, even though it is possible, no one has built a persistent online world that each player has the capability to rise to power, overthrow the head honcho NPC characters, and get knifed in the back by his/her buddy who wants to run things now.

Doesn't Shadowbane let you do this? You can supposedly build and own the cities only to have your guildmates betray you. Never really got into the endgame so I'm not sure...

The two pieces missing from the puzzle are OpenGL and Playstation. All bases must be covered to provide a coherent response to Microsoft's strategy. Unless there's a geniune console competitor to PS2/XBox that runs Java and OpenGL that I haven't heard announced at GDC yet.

"The CELL processor will rely on a variation of the of the standard OpenGL library, with plans between Sony and the Khronos Group to develop Open GL/ES, an extension specifically designed for interactive content."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSGL:PSGL is a 3D computer graphics API based on OpenGL ES for the Sony PlayStation 3. A previous version of PSGL was available for the Sony PlayStation 2 but was largely unused.

It's true there's java for linux on PS3, but it doesn't seem very realistic to target those 5 geeks that went into the trouble of installing YDL and java. Linux also doesn't have access to the graphics hardware, so hw accellerated OpenGL is not possible.

Linux aside, there's no java on PS3 apart from BluRay, which is no full-blown J2SE JRE by any means, and afaik not available outside of BluRay discs making it again not realistic for games (seriously, would you download a BluRay disc image of tic-tac-toe, burn it on a BluRay disc to play it on your PS3? ).

What would have made PS3 interesting for java games if it would at least have J2SE support in the PS3 browser, preferrably with OpenGL support in the form of JOGL or LWJGL. But alas, it doesn't, and it doesn't look like that will change.

I'm sure an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of Playstations can eventually get a fast, stable JVM running on one with lovely fast OpenGL drivers and start releasing and distributing games for it with Sony's blessing.

...but there are more useful things for everyone to be doing with their time, like dreaming of never ending kebabs, or flying cars.

I'm sure an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of Playstations can eventually get a fast, stable JVM running on one with lovely fast OpenGL drivers and start releasing and distributing games for it with Sony's blessing.

...but there are more useful things for everyone to be doing with their time, like dreaming of never ending kebabs, or flying cars.

Cas

I hate the way you treat people here, especially people who don't agree with you.

Sorry, I may be a little cynical in my dotage, but it's good to have a little reality poured on the fires of mindless optimism. Java & OpenGL on PS3 is a waste of everyone's time - why not put energies into enthusing about promoting it where it's genuinely strong and meaningful, on the desktop?

<edit> I really am sorry, I don't mean to be mean or nasty, just illustrating the incredibly unlikeliness of it all with a daft comparison.

Sorry, I may be a little cynical in my dotage, but it's good to have a little reality poured on the fires of mindless optimism. Java & OpenGL on PS3 is a waste of everyone's time - why not put energies into enthusing about promoting it where it's genuinely strong and meaningful, on the desktop?

<edit> I really am sorry, I don't mean to be mean or nasty, just illustrating the incredibly unlikeliness of it all with a daft comparison.

Cas

I recently discovered that some Linux users performed the experiment with PSGL and OpenJDK... without success for the moment but it proves that some people don't agree with you, some people don't think that Java OpenGL on PS3 is a waste of everyone's time. I still use Java ( and JOGL) for my own 3D game and I go on promoting it on the desktop, there is no contradiction.

This talk has been going on since the first PS2 arrived and it continues to the present. Right now I think we can safely say that it's not going to happen in a hurry.

Maybe when the game has shifted a couple of million copies on the desktop you could worry about creating a console version but even then I suspect that keeping the logic and the graphical assets and adapting it to run in a PS3-specific engine (or better still licencing someone else to port it) would simply work better and be cheaper than trying to get Java running on a platform where there is no real interest in having it.

If the time spent on worrying about Java/OGL on the console was spent writing good games that use Java and sell a lot of copies then it would be much more likely that someone would see a business case for creating a good java runtime on the platform. Otherwise it won't happen, or if it does it will happen in the most niche way, which is hardly the point of writing for games consoles.

This talk has been going on since the first PS2 arrived and it continues to the present.

More specifically, Chris M has been bullshitting us with vauge hand-wavy promisies of Java on consoles since PS2. We're all a little tired and cynical until we see some physical results we can play with ourselves first hand.

More specifically, Chris M has been bullshitting us with vauge hand-wavy promisies of Java on consoles since PS2. We're all a little tired and cynical until we see some physical results we can play with ourselves first hand.

Pleasant! Well, I can only tell you what the companies (sun and others) tell us. Other bits are under hard lined NDAs. As for where all of this started, it was the former President of Sun and the CTO of Sony standing on stage at JavaOne and announcing it, not me. This proclamation was handed to the new "Don't we have someone focusing on game type things?" guy. Since then, it has not been without its challenges, to say the least. I can assure you that no one has pushed harder than I have to get Java on a game console. Due to NDAs, and yes, that means I can't tell people outside of the NDAs what is happening, what I have been able to communicate is extremely limited.

There is no intention of bullshitting, as you so nicely put it, and when I have stated in the past that things were moving along, well, they were. But there are a lot of moving parts and nothing is as easy as it seems if you are on the outside looking in, believe me.

Yes, I'll have to agree with Chris here that 'bullshitting' is really overly harsh and totally uncalled for. As far as I can tell, a real effort had been made to get java on the PS2 but sadly it just didn't work out as we all (and I'm sure Chris included) hoped it would.

I can only speak for myself, but I've just become a bit more reserved about the issue because the PS2 story told us that even Sun persueing java on the console doesn't necessarily mean it's going to happen or that us indie developers are going to benefit from it. There is more to it than just getting a VM onto it.

On the positive side, I've actually seen JEmu2 run on a PS3/YDL, which is more than I expected. Who knows, maybe the PS3/Linux community will grow enough to make it count. I'm not holding my breath, but never say never...

EDIT:As an even more positive note, the fact that there is actually a JVM running on a PS3 (even though only on Linux) can perhaps serve as an excellent proof of concept for a successful java game (puzzle pirates, runescape on PSN?). That is a huge step forward compared to the PS2 situation in that there's now actually something to physically play with. I'd even go as far as to say that this might even not have happened if Sun/Chris didn't advocate this proposition, or at least I can imagine it helped.

EDIT2:

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If the time spent on worrying about Java/OGL on the console was spent writing good games that use Java and sell a lot of copies then it would be much more likely that someone would see a business case for creating a good java runtime on the platform.

That's too easy. What do you suggest, closing the General Discussions/Off-Topic forums?

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